In August 1962, a group of Peace Corps Volunteers crossed the Atlantic Ocean to become teachers in the secondary schools of Sierra Leone, a little known country on the West Coast of Africa at that time. My Heart Is like a Cabbage recounts in painful detail the missteps one of those Volunteers made trying to respond to President John F. Kennedy's new experiment in foreign affairs: a cadre largely composed of young college graduates charged to work together with "the citizens of the world . . . for the freedom of man." Plucked from middleclass America and in the space of a day set down in the...